Chamber examining how it does business

SYDNEY — The Sydney and Area Chamber of Commerce has been doing some soul-searching and strategic planning, looking at what its focus should be, how it can be a strong voice for businesses and where it should go in the future.

The process began after the chamber’s president and executive director left the organization for other positions, said current executive director Adrian White. When he was hired earlier this year, White and new chamber president John MacNeil put their heads together.

“We sort of sat down and thought about what is the chamber really doing, what is it accomplishing, is it relevant in the community anymore, does it have a voice because there are many, many more entities in the community nowadays than there were, say, 30 years ago,” White said.

Those bodies, including Nova Scotia Business Inc., Cape Breton County Economic Development Authority and Enterprise Cape Breton Corp., have strong voices and it seems they are who business people turn to when considering setting up shop in the region, White said.

“We wanted to say, if we’re going to be relevant, if we’re going to be a voice in the community, we’ve got to get focused on what we can do for our businesses. It’s not economic development; that’s a crowded field in CBRM and besides, we don’t have a budget for that,” he said.

At a meeting this week, the chamber’s council discussed how to best approach advocacy in terms of barriers to business growth, and also entrepreneurship and business mentorship, White said.

The chamber is surveying members to find out what they think about initiatives looking at such things as provincial or municipal regulation, commercial property tax or transportation restrictions.

Once the results of that survey are in, the intention is to form committees that can then reach out to people who have the strengths needed to address those issues.

“Then (they will) pick what they see as the important initiatives and focus on those for the membership and try to accomplish the goal of helping our business community here on Cape Breton Island be a really good, strong business community and being the voice of that business community,” White said.

White added he hopes the committees will be able to begin their work early next year.